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Your Best Year Ever — Chapter-01: Your Beliefs Shape Your Reality
- Source: /library/Your Best Year Ever/source-file.pdf
- PDF pages: 22–29
- Pages without text: 25
- Note: Includes the Step introduction page that precedes the chapter.
BELIEVE the POSSIBILITY There’s an old saying: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” That’s especially true when we’re thinking of our personal histories. Why? The circumstances of our lives change week by week, year by year. But we’re still us. And our habits of thinking tend to produce consistent results no matter what’s going on in our work, our relationships, or the world around us. If our habits of thinking are beneficial, we tend to experience positive results, such as happiness, personal satisfaction, even material success. If our habits of thinking are counterproductive, however, we often experience the opposite: unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and the nagging feeling that the deck is somehow stacked against us. The good news is that you can change the rhyme scheme. Even if your habits of thinking are already serving you well, you can experience transformative personal improvement in all areas of your life by upgrading your beliefs. When we focus on belief improvement, often our circumstances follow suit.
1 Your Beliefs Shape Your Reality What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. RABIH ALAMEDDINE, The Hakawati Several years ago my wife, Gail, and I had an English setter named Nelson. He was gentle, patient, and great with the grandkids. He had only one fault. Whenever the front door would open, he bolted like a prison escapee. It could take twenty minutes to chase him down and bring him home. The scariest thing was watching him narrowly escape an oncoming car. We didn’t know what to do. Until we discovered Invisible Fence. It was the breakthrough we needed. It works by pairing an underground perimeter wire to an electronic collar. If Nelson approached the boundary, his collar delivered a warning vibration to stay back. With some additional training, he quickly learned where the line was and avoided it. No more bolting out the door. We could actually leave him in the yard without fear he would run away. But here’s what’s interesting. After a while we realized the collar was no longer necessary. If we stood on the other side of the barrier and called, he wouldn’t come. If the kids tried to entice him with a treat, he wouldn’t budge. The barrier had moved from the external world of an electronic device to the internal world of Nelson’s head.
The Power of Beliefs Our beliefs play a massive part in how we approach life. We tend to experience what we expect. We’ve known this for a long time. “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences,” said sociologist William I. Thomas in 1928. Reflecting on “the Thomas theorem” twenty years later, sociologist Robert K. Merton coined the phrase “self-fulfilling prophecy.” And in 1957 philosopher Karl Popper labeled it the “Oedipus Effect,” after the mythic hero whose life fulfilled a tragic prophecy.1 As science writer Chris Berdik said in his book Mind Over Mind, “Our real world is in many ways an expected world. What we see, hear, taste, feel, and experience is produced from the top down as much as it is from the bottom up. Our minds organize chaos. We fill in blanks with well- learned forms, patterns, and assumptions. Our predictions for the near and distant future bend reality.”2 How? It’s not fantasy. Nor is it related to any supposed law of attraction, as some might think. It’s actually far simpler than that. Because our expectations shape what we believe is possible, they shape our perceptions and actions. That means they also shape the outcomes. And that means they shape our reality. Remember the old Tiger Woods? The pre-meltdown Woods who burnt up the record books year after year? Some of his clutch shots are legendary. At the 2003 Presidents Cup in South Africa, for example, he sunk a fifteen-foot putt in the near dark. It seemed like an impossible shot. Everyone thought so—but not Woods. Listen to what his teammate Mike Weir said about that shot: “He knew he was going to make it. . . . That’s probably what separated him more than anything else: his belief.”3 Do you hear what Weir is saying? Many other golfers had the skill to make those shots. But they lacked the belief they could pull it off. That’s true for a lot of us.
The Problem with Doubts One of the biggest reasons we don’t succeed with our goals is we doubt we can. We believe they’re out of reach. Polls show the percentage of people in their twenties who achieve their New Year’s resolutions is far greater than those over fifty.4 In fact, while eight in ten millennials set resolutions, almost seven in ten adults over sixty-five say setting resolutions is “a waste of time,” according to a Harris Poll.5 Why? It’s sad, but the greater the number of setbacks we’ve experienced in life, the less likely we are to believe we can prevail. Doubt is a goal toxin. As I said earlier, most of us have a long history of not getting what we want out of life. To shield ourselves from future disappointment, we develop a cynical, self-protective attitude toward life. We’re like Nelson. We’ve tried to step out in the past and been zapped—or far worse. Maybe it was only once. Or maybe it was several times. Regardless, now we stand still even when there is no actual barrier. The one in our heads is strong enough to keep us stuck.
We all face obstacles. While limiting beliefs prevent us from overcoming them, liberating truths help us transcend obstacles and improve our circumstances. You know what this looks like. You say, “I need to apply for that new job.” But then you think, “There’s no way. I don’t have enough experience or enough education.” Suddenly, an idea that might take you to the next chapter of your story just withers and dies. Or maybe a friend says, “Hey, you and Bill should go to that marriage retreat this weekend.” And you think, “Are you kidding me? I can’t get him off the couch for an evening, let alone a whole weekend.” Or somebody says, “I think it would be awesome to run a 5K.” And you think, “Maybe I should.” But then the cynicism sets in. “I’m forty pounds overweight,” you think. “I’ve got a bum knee. There’s no way I could possibly run a 5K.” It’s hard to get your hopes dashed if you never get them up to begin with. But that kind of cynicism poisons our souls and sabotages our results. Our beliefs about what’s possible have a direct impact on the reality we experience. But what if you could change your sense of what’s possible?
A Different Frame Triple-A baseball pitcher Steve Mura was starting one night in an away game, but he almost lost before leaving the dugout. Why? “I can never win on this mound,” he told his pitching coach, Harvey Dorfman. Dorfman didn’t buy that for a second. But he could see Mura was already preparing to lose. So Dorfman pushed Mura to explain his belief. The pitcher said the angle of the mound was wrong. And for Mura, that settled it. But not for his coach. It was just a jumping-off point. Dorfman asked what kind of adjustments he could make. Sounds simple, I know. But it was like a switch. That one suggestion created a new sense of possibility. Before the game, Mura came up with a new strategy to deal with the unfriendly slope of the mound. “There is a difference,” Dorfman told Mura, “between, ‘I have not won’ and ‘I cannot win. . . .’” The past didn’t determine the future—unless Mura’s belief led him to act like it did. “You don’t think about strategies when you think that outcome is inevitable,” said Dorfman. But by changing his belief, Mura was able to change his strategy and the outcome. He pitched an almost-perfect game that night—just two hits and no runs.6 Mura faced a major challenge. But like Nelson, it was in his mind, not on the field. I find that’s true for almost all areas of life. “Many of the circumstances that seem to block us in our daily lives may only appear to do so based on a framework of assumptions we carry with us,” say Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander. “Draw a different frame around the same set of circumstances and new pathways come into view.”7 History’s full of similar stories. Pilots once thought it was impossible to fly faster than 768 miles an hour (the speed of sound at sea level). But Chuck Yeager figured he could do it and officially broke the sound barrier on October 14, 1947. Planes have only advanced since then, and pilots regularly fly two, four, even six times the speed of sound. Before 1954, runners assumed it was impossible to run a mile in less than four minutes. Then Roger Bannister ran it in three minutes, fifty-nine seconds and change—a record that has since been beaten by other runners. People have dreamt about human-powered flight for millennia. But then in 1977 someone developed an engineless plane capable of sustained, controlled flight. That was just the start. In 1988, Greek cycling champion Kanellos Kanellopoulos flew more than seventy miles over open sea all by
pedal power.8 And he’s not the only one. Building and flying people- powered aircraft is a weekend hobby for some nowadays. Here’s another example. In the middle 1980s, skateboarder Mike McGill did the first ever 540-degree aerial turn in his sport. That’s a full rotation and a half. No one thought it could be done, but once McGill finally did the “McTwist,” others began doing it too, pushing it further still. Tony Hawk did the first-ever 720-degree turn. And then in 2012 Tom Schaar—at just twelve years old—did the first-ever 1080. That’s three full rotations in the air! As Schaar told ESPN, “It was the hardest trick I’ve ever done, but”— and get this—“it was easier than I thought.”9 “Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along and do it,” jazz pianist Thelonious Monk said.10 The impossible only seems so on the front end. Yeager, Bannister, Kanellopoulos, McGill, and Hawk showed the rest of us that more than we previously believed was attainable. Will you be the next Schaar and take it even further? A Failure of Imagination The first key difference between an unmet goal and personal success is the belief that it can be achieved. Listen to what famed futurist, sci-fi author, and inventor Arthur C. Clarke said: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” As Clarke said, it’s a “failure of imagination.”11 And it’s not just scientists. That failure of imagination affects athletes, parents, leaders, managers, teachers, and the rest of us to one degree or another. The good news is that it doesn’t have to. Broadly speaking, there are two ways to look at life. One leads directly to this failure of imagination. But the other can revive and amplify our sense of possibility. We’ll look at the difference next.